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We Are All Baby Ducks9Since you are almost always aware of your body and yourmind (because awareness follows your body and mind around),you come to the mistaken conclusion that you are your bodyand your mind. You fail to recognize that what you are is theempty, spacious awareness that the body and mind appear in.You assume, since they are almost always here, I am the bodyand the mind.This is a simple and completely understandable mistake.Unfortunately, it is also a colossal mistake and the source of allyour suffering. It’s as if you had a fly on your nose that stuckaround so long that you decided you were the fly. Imagine howconfused you would feel and act if you believed you were a fly.You would spend all day eating rotten food and trying to matewith other flies!Well you are making as big a mistake when you concludethat you are the body and the mind. It’s not that there isanything wrong with the body or the mind; it’s just that theyare not really who you are. All the problems you experience areonly problems for the body or the mind. The spaciousawareness has no problems. How can space have a problem? Itcan’t be harmed or diminished in any way. You can set off abomb in space, and when the dust settles, the space will becompletely unharmed.This mistaken identity as the body and mind creates all ofyour suffering. If the body or mind were having an experiencethat you considered a problem, but you realized that you were

10Living from the Heartnot the body or the mind, would you suffer from thoseproblems? Right now, are you suffering dramatically over theproblems of someone you have never met? Probably not, sincethey aren’t your problems. So what if none of your problemsare really your problems? What if the spacious awareness thatyou really are can’t have problems?Exercise: Consider for a moment something you areexperiencing that seems like a problem. Withoutchanging your experience or even your knowledge andunderstanding of the problem in any way, check if thespace in which the thoughts or circumstances of theproblem are happening has any difficulty with thosethoughts and circumstances. Does the space in whichthe difficulty is appearing have a problem? Can spaceitself ever have a problem? If for just a moment, youidentify with the space that both you and the problemare in, do you have a problem? Can you as the spaceever have a problem?Recognizing yourself as aware space is a radical shift inyour usual identity or sense of your self. It may be a whilebefore you can really believe or, more importantly, consistentlyexperience your identity as aware space. We are profoundlyconditioned or imprinted onto our usual identification with thebody and mind. You may discover you have a deep and abiding

We Are All Baby Ducks11conviction that you really are the body and your inner life ofthoughts and feelings. We don’t give up our deepestconvictions easily.As you read this, you might want to hold open thepossibility that you are mistaken. Try out the possibility thatyou really are the space, and see for yourself if this fits morewith the evidence of your experience. If you can temporarilyset aside the conviction that who you are is your physical bodyand the flow of mental activity, you will be better able to sensefor yourself the truth being pointed to here.What It Is Like to Look out from the HeadAs you were growing up and everyone was teaching andconditioning you to follow the experience of your body andmind, your identity moved into the body and head. Since youreyes, ears, nose, taste buds, and brain are all located in yourhead, the awareness and the identity also became localizedthere. Since the head is where your awareness became located,that is where you now look, feel, and sense from.As a result of awareness flowing through your head, itbecomes shaped by your thoughts. This wouldn’t matter if youonly had a thought occasionally, but most of us have very busyminds. As a result, awareness is profoundly shaped and limitedby its tendency to flow through the head. Every little thought

12Living from the Heartthat arises takes your awareness for a ride through innerlandscapes of doubt, worry, hope, and conjecture.Most of the time these inner landscapes have only a slightcorrespondence with what is really happening, and often theyhave absolutely nothing to do with reality. Have you everthought someone was mad at you, only to find out he or shejust had a stomach ache? So why do we pay so much attentionto our thoughts? Because every now and then, they are right.Every now and then, a thought does correspond to somethingout there. As any psychology student knows, an intermittentreward, or success, is more powerfully reinforcing than aconstant one.So, you end up with your awareness flowing through yourhead and through your thoughts. What is awareness like whenit flows through thoughts? What effect do your thoughts haveon awareness itself?Thought itself is a very small phenomenon. All of yourthoughts fit between your ears, so how big can they be? Sowhen awareness flows through thoughts, it becomes verysmall. Consequently, your sense of self becomes small becausefundamentally you are the awareness, so when awarenesscontracts onto a thought, it takes on the size and shape of thatexperience.However, when awareness gets focused onto something italso magnifies it. Try it out: Pick up an object and focus allyour attention on it. Does it appear smaller or bigger when you

We Are All Baby Ducks13focus on it? It tends to look bigger. When you habitually focuson your thoughts, the content or meaning of them is magnified,even as your awareness and the sense of self is contracted.When your awareness is flowing so constantly to your thoughtsand through the head, it becomes chronically narrowed andlimited.This is not bad and even has some value at times forsurvival, but it is also limiting and narrow. When yourawareness is narrow and limited, you miss a lot of what ishappening. Much of reality is simply not noticed because whenawareness is contracted, unawareness is expanded.Exercise: For a moment, put your hands around youreyes like a set of blinders. Does your awareness of theroom you are in get bigger or smaller? The roomdoesn’t get smaller, but your awareness of it shrinks—you are seeing less of the room. Now notice: Does thepart of the room that you are not seeing get bigger orsmaller? Of course what you are not seeing gets biggerif you are seeing less.The net effect of being imprinted onto your body andespecially onto your head and your thoughts is that you tend tolook out from your head: You live in your head and look outfrom it. You see, smell, hear, feel, sense, and ponder life withyour head. This means that what you are seeing, smelling,

14Living from the Hearthearing, sensing, and pondering is limited by and filteredthrough your thoughts. Your thoughts mediate between youand reality and interfere with you seeing it more fully and morepurely. They color it, change it, and only consider part of it. Ina sense, you are living in a dream, all because you are lookingout of your head and your thoughts.This is so common that you don’t even notice that thisshaping of awareness is occurring. You get used to it. Just asyou assume that the body and mind must be what you arebecause they are always present, you also assume the worldyou see through your mind is the real world. You assume thatthings really are the way your mind perceives them.While it may be difficult to distinguish the effects of thisimprinting, you may be able to sense how typically narrow ortight or contracted your perspective is. Because of themagnifying effect of this narrow perspective, the content ofyour thoughts can seem quite huge and even overwhelming.This is how you make a mountain out of a molehill. For amoment, see if you can sense directly the shape of theawareness in this moment—not the content of your thoughts—but the flow of awareness itself.Exercise: Awareness is flowing in this moment. Justcheck, are you aware of anything at all? Reallyanything at all will do for this exercise, including athought arising in your mind or simply the words

We Are All Baby Ducks15appearing on this page. So if you are aware ofsomething right now, where is this awareness flowingfrom? Can you sense where the awareness is comingfrom? Is it coming from your big toe, the ceiling, ordoes it seem to be coming from your head?What is the awareness itself like in this moment? Is itexpanded and open and flowing freely, or is it morefocused and narrow? There is no right answer, and it isalways subtly changing, becoming narrower or moreopen. What is it like right now—not the content of yourexperience, but the experiencing itself? It may be theusual awareness that is shaped by flowing through yourhead, but just notice what that is like.Awareness that is shaped by flowing through the head andby thoughts is typically tight and constricted. Just as a musclerequires effort to stay contracted, this tightness of awarenesshas an effortful quality. It is often not very satisfying, liketrying to drink through a very narrow straw. You can neverquite get enough of what is happening, so naturally you tryharder: You think harder and try to understand what ishappening, which only narrows the view even more.Awareness that flows through your mind creates anunderlying sense of there not being enough. Even if you arehaving a wonderful experience, there is a sense of not beingable to absorb it all, so you may want to hang on to it or try to

16Living from the Heartcapture it some way (e.g. in a snapshot or home video) so thatlater you can get more of the experience. This is all the resultof looking through your head. It is so habitual that it seemsnormal to feel so dissatisfied and incomplete.But what if there is another way of looking that shapes theworld in a completely different way—so differently that theworld doesn’t even appear to be the same world? What wouldit be like to look from your Heart?

Chapter 2Another Way to Sense Your WorldThe Flexibility of PerspectiveDespite the habitual tendency to look out from your head, itis actually quite simple to move the point where yourperspective originates from. Some have suggested thatdyslexics have an unusually flexible perspective that moves sofreely that, in a sense, they can see words on a page from boththe front and back. As a result, they can see letters in theirusual order and also from the opposite side, which makes themappear backwards. For a dyslexic, there are benefits to learningto stabilize, or fix, their perspective—where they look from.However, for the rest of us, moving our perspective aroundcan free it up. In many of the therapeutic interventions used inNeuro-Linguistic Programming, a person is invited to see

18Living from the Hearthimself or herself from the outside. This gives a unique, andoften useful, perspective on what is happening.Without moving the perspective outside the body but simplydown into the Heart, you can profoundly alter the shaping ofyour awareness.The Shift into the HeartThe center of your chest, which is next to your physicalheart, is often considered the spiritual center of your Being. Formany centuries, it was believed that thinking happened in theheart rather than in the brain. What would it be like toexperience the world from this energetic center instead of fromthe head? What effect would that have on your experience ofthe world and of yourself?Exercise: Try this exercise first with your eyes closedand then open. Notice what you are aware of in thismoment—the sounds, a thought, the objects around you.Notice if you are looking or listening or sensing fromthe head, and notice what that is like. Now gently dropyour sensing down into your Heart. This is not a matterof sensing the Heart or feeling what is in your Heart,but feeling your surroundings from the center of yourchest. At first, it can be helpful to rest your hand on thecenter of your chest next to your heart, to help orient

Another Way to Sense Your World19yourself to looking from this place. Allow what you areseeing to be seen by your Heart instead of your head.What is it like to sense, listen, and look from yourHeart? Pick an object and sense it with your Heartinstead of your head. How is that?The key is to allow awareness to flow from the Heart.Especially at first, it’s not important to sense the Heart itself.It’s simpler at first if you just sense an ordinary object, like apiece of furniture, from your Heart. The important thing iswhere your awareness seems to be located. Because of thestrongly imprinted tendency to look from the head and throughyour thoughts, you may find at first that you are looking intoyour Heart, or you may be thinking about what it would be liketo look from the Heart. If you are just imagining what thatwould be like, your awareness would still be shaped bythoughts—in this case, a thought about this new way oflooking.See if you can do this, if only for a moment—just look orsense from your Heart. What is that like even if it only lastsbriefly? Does your awareness open up and expand? Do yousense things in a different way? Most people find that theirawareness becomes softer, wider, and more open. This issimply the way awareness flows when it’s not being sonarrowly shaped by the mind. Just as a muscle naturally

20Living from the Heartexpands when you are not contracting it, awareness expandswhen it’s not being shaped and constricted by your thoughts.Exercise: Take some time to play with this new way ofsensing and looking. What do the objects around youlook or feel like when you look at them from the Heart?How do you experience other people with your Heart?What are sounds or music like when you listen from theHeart? What about your thoughts? They may still bearising in the usual way, but what if you listen to andwatch them from the Heart? Do they seem as important,or are they just passing words and pictures in a largeopen space? See how the world looks and feels fromhere. It is another world. Explore this new world.Discover what your day-to-day experiences are likewhen they are sensed from the Heart.As mentioned, it can be helpful to close your eyes at firstwhen sensing from the Heart. Because the eyes are located inthe head, when you are seeing, the tendency is for awareness tolocate itself in the head rather than in the Heart. So, until youget the hang of looking from your Heart, it might be easier tosimply sense objects and people with your Heart with youreyes closed. Then slowly add listening and finally looking withyour eyes open.

Another Way to Sense Your World21Keep checking to notice if the awareness is actually flowingfrom the Heart or if it has moved back up into your head. If itdoes, that’s fine—no harm is done to the awareness. But whenit does shift back into the more habitual perspective of lookingfrom the head, notice what that is like. Does it stay open andexpanded, or does it become narrow and focused, like amagnifying glass or a microscope? Then you can gently movethe perspective back down to the Heart and check for yourselfwhat that’s like. Does the awareness open up again and relax?At first, there may be so much momentum to looking fromthe head that you may only be able to sense or look from theHeart for a few seconds at a time. That’s fine. Just notice whatyou can about the quality of your awareness whenever it isactually in your Heart. With time, you should be able to extendthe time you listen, look, or sense from your Heart. Maybe youwill find you can listen to an entire song from your Heart orwatch a sunset from your Heart. What if you were to watchTV, wash the dishes, or talk on the phone while looking andlistening from the Heart? You may find yourself thinking aboutyour life or planning your weekend, but for a change, noticethese thoughts from your Heart.Your awareness can flow from more than one place at atime. At times, it may be flowing mostly from your head, andat other times, mostly from your Heart. If the awareness isflowing partly from your head and partly from your Heart, thequalities of the awareness will be somewhere in between. It

22Living from the Heartmight be more open and allowing than usual, but still have adegree of focus and direction.The Qualities of the Heart’s PerspectiveHere are some clues that awareness is flowing at least partlyfrom the Heart: The awareness will be wider and more open;the boundaries between the awareness and the objects inawareness will seem less substantial; there will be more of asense of oneness and connection with whatever you aresensing; and thoughts will be less of a concern or not noticed atall. When something is very small, it can be easily overlooked,and thoughts are actually very small realities.Most of the time, you experience thoughts from the head.This is like having your nose up close to a TV screen. Thecontent of your thoughts is right in front of your awareness.When you drop into the Heart, thoughts continue to occur, butyou will be experiencing them from down in the Heart. Now itis as if that TV is playing up in the attic instead of right in frontof you. This puts the content of your thoughts into perspective.When experienced from the Heart, they are not such a big deal.When awareness is flowing through the Heart, it alsoincludes much more of what is happening. As a result, theexperience is much more satisfying. Instead of trying to takelife in through a narrow view, you can drink to your Heart’s

Another Way to Sense Your World23content. There is a richness and fullness to even very ordinaryexperiences.If the opposite qualities are predominant, that would meanyou have returned to looking from your head. So, if the viewcontracts, the boundaries seem more real, you feel separate ordissatisfied, and thoughts suddenly take up the entire screen ofyour consciousness, chances are you (as awareness) areresiding in the head again.Exercise: Pick something in your environment and thensense it first with your head and then with your Heart.How are these different? The contrast between the twomodes of looking, listening, and sensing will allow youto notice the differences in the awareness itself as itflows from the head and then from the Heart. For thisexercise, keep your awareness on the same object,sound, or thought. Then any difference will be directlyrelated to where you are sensi

6 Living from the Heart That aware space is the real you. It is what you are made of, what you exist as here and now. It also turns out that everything that really matters in life is found in this aware space. This is where love, peace, joy, compassion, wisdom, strength, and a sense of worth are found. .